A new measurement tool holds Hollywood’s most profitable genre to account
A regular viewer of CBS crime shows during the 2020-2021 season watched “Good Guy” police characters commit egregious wrongful actions – murder, brutality, planting evidence, illegal surveillance – an average of 47.2 times per week. Across all of Paramount Global’s crime lineup, that number climbed to 76.7. These weren’t villains. They were the heroes.
That finding comes from Normalizing Injustice 2, the most comprehensive study of scripted crime television ever conducted. Rashad Robinson provided the impetus and overall direction for the report during his 13-year tenure as President of Color Of Change, where he led a team that built the Normalizing Injustice research series into one of the most rigorous accountability projects targeting the entertainment industry. The 2025 report analyzed 71 first-run crime shows across 22 networks and nine parent corporations. Its research team coded 721 complete episodes, totaling 549 hours of content, and tracked 5,934 variables across 370 distinct metrics for every single episode.
Robinson, now founder and President of Rashad Robinson Advisors, has spent years arguing that the stories Americans consume on screen have direct consequences for the policies they accept in real life. His work as a consulting producer on Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and consulting roles on shows including Seven Seconds, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Grey’s Anatomy gave him a producer’s-eye view of how crime narratives get made, and how easily they can mislead. The Normalizing Injustice reports turned that industry knowledge into rigorous, data-driven accountability.
What the Copaganda Index Actually Measures
The report’s central tool is the Copaganda Index, a proprietary scoring system built from 17 weighted metrics across five categories. Each metric captures a specific narrative practice that amplifies warped and self-serving propaganda for law enforcement and the legal system, whether explicitly or implicitly. The resulting score exposes a show’s overall pattern of representation: the ideas it consistently feeds its viewers and the influence those ideas would likely have on them.
The term “copaganda” itself has a precise definition in the study. It refers to any media content that promotes debunked ideas positioning law enforcement and the criminal justice system as beyond scrutiny and accountability. Intent doesn’t matter. A show can function as copaganda whether or not its creators designed it that way. What matters is the pattern: does the show rationalize the status quo and undermine efforts at reform?
Almost all 71 shows did, to varying degrees. The 15 worst offenders all scored above 100 on the Index. Chicago P.D., Mayor of Kingstown, and City on a Hill ranked at the bottom. Paramount Global and NBCUniversal together produced 24 of the 30 shows with the worst scores, accounting for 80 percent of the worst-performing programs. They also owned 16 of the 17 shows with the very worst scores, a 94 percent share.
Six of the seven shows with the worst Copaganda Index scores were still producing new episodes in 2024 or returning in 2025. Five of those six were Paramount Global shows. Three were Dick Wolf productions airing on CBS/Paramount and NBC.
The Good Guy Endorser Effect
One of the report’s sharpest findings concerns what it calls the “Good Guy Endorser Effect.” Nearly every show depicted bad behavior – murder, brutality, evidence tampering, coercion – as being committed by characters coded as good people with good intentions. The message to viewers was consistent across the genre: when police do bad things, it’s because they have to. It’s forgivable. It’s even noble.
The numbers are blunt. Both Paramount Global and NBCUniversal averaged a Good Guy Endorser Ratio of 8:1 across all their episodes. That means for every instance of a “Bad Guy” law enforcement character committing a wrongful act, viewers saw eight instances of a “Good Guy” doing the same thing. NBC’s standalone ratio reached 14:1. CBS hit 12:1.
Nine shows endorsed wrongful acts at the most extreme level, depicting good characters committing egregious wrongful actions more than 25 times as often as bad characters. Chicago P.D., FBI: Most Wanted, NCIS, Blue Bloods, Magnum, P.I., NCIS: Los Angeles, The Rookie, Departure, and Coroner all made the list.
The effect is intuitive once you see the data. When a character the audience loves and trusts plants evidence or beats a suspect, the act gets absorbed into the show’s moral framework as a justified cost of catching bad guys. The idea that systemic injustice, corruption, or racism might drive those actions doesn’t enter the picture. The report found that 70 percent of all Egregious Wrongful Actions across the genre were portrayed as good and acceptable: either explicitly justified, presented as routine “business as usual,” or framed as problematic but ultimately warranted.
Who Gets to Tell These Stories
The production diversity findings map neatly onto the Copaganda Index scores. Almost all shows in the worst half of the rankings – 30 out of 35 – had overwhelmingly white creative leadership. Among the 39 shows scoring above 50, there were only two non-white showrunners out of 51 total showrunner credits.
The correlation ran in the other direction, too. The seven shows with the greatest racial diversity in creative leadership – those with more than 50 percent people of color in producer and senior writer roles – clustered toward the bottom of the Copaganda Index, meaning less propagandistic content. Shows with low scores were much more likely to have showrunners of color and, to a lesser extent, women showrunners.
The report also tracked a pattern it calls Racial Endorsement. Twenty-one of 32 shows centered on a law enforcement star or co-star of color. Many used those characters to engage continuously in copaganda’s drumbeat while occasionally adding a reformist perspective on race and policing. On Bosch, 38 percent of “Good Guy” law enforcement characters were people of color, yet those characters committed 65 percent of all “Good Guy” wrongful actions. The Blacklist, S.W.A.T., and The Good Fight operated similarly, using characters of color to make police abuse look race-neutral.
Eight Categories of Misinformation
Beyond copaganda, the report documents eight distinct categories of legal-system misinformation that the genre routinely promotes. Detention facilities were sanitized: 52 of 57 shows that depicted some form of detention never, rarely, or only in half their episodes portrayed those facilities as abusive. Thirty-five shows never portrayed them as abusive at all. Only five shows, including Mayor of Kingstown and American Rust, depicted prison or jail as abusive in every episode that showed them.
Solitary confinement appeared in 21 shows. Sixteen of them never depicted it as inhumane, abusive, or problematic. Forensic science was celebrated as reliable and conclusive despite decades of debunking. Only one show out of 71 – Apple TV+’s Home Before Dark – depicted characters successfully challenging debunked forensic methods. Defense attorneys were portrayed in line with a cynical template normalized by Law & Order in the 1990s, with low-income defendants receiving the kind of high-level representation that public defender organizations openly acknowledge is aspirational, not real. Crime victims were distorted along racial lines as well. Several shows regularly portrayed Black and Latino people committing crimes against white people, reinforcing the false and racist idea that communities of color pose a constant physical threat. Eight shows did so nearly once per episode or more. Meanwhile, 69 of the 71 shows depicted police officers as victims of violent attack at least once, and 37 showed it happening once per episode or more, promoting the debunked notion that law enforcement is perpetually under siege from the communities it polices.
Why It Matters Now
Robinson provided the impetus and overall direction for the Normalizing Injustice research during his time leading Color Of Change, building it across three reports: Race in the Writers’ Room in 2017, the original Normalizing Injustice in 2020, and this 2025 follow-up. Each expanded in scope and methodological rigor. The first report examined 26 shows; this one nearly tripled that number while adding the Copaganda Index, qualitative interviews with 45 industry professionals, and fan community analysis. Through his current advisory practice under Rashad Robinson Advisors, Robinson continues to push corporations and media companies toward accountability on racial justice.
The report’s four recommendations target network-level accountability: making production standards transparent, removing the most harmful episodes from rotation, setting firm standards to prevent misinformation, and introducing outside expert oversight at CBS and NBC. These aren’t calls for censorship. They’re calls for the same kind of standards-setting that has already removed derogatory language from syndicated reruns of Sex and the City, edited out smoking from Disney productions, and pulled individual episodes with egregiously offensive stereotypes from rotation.
Freedom Table, Robinson’s monthly conversation series with NewsOne, dedicated its January 2026 episode to examining the copaganda problem – bringing together journalists, industry insiders, and advocates to work through who benefits from the current system and where accountability could actually take hold.
Crime television is the single most profitable genre for the corporations that produce it. The shows keep getting made. The Copaganda Index data suggests the question isn’t whether these shows influence how viewers think about policing, race, and justice. The question is whether the corporations profiting from that influence will accept any responsibility for it.
